YouTube has announced on Monday the addition of 360-degree live streaming to its platform, which allows users to experience a more realistic approach to its broadcasting. The Google-owned website also launched spatial audio for on-demand YouTube videos.
As a launching event for the 360-degree live streaming, the video-sharing website used Coachella and some selected artists in the event to give a peek to its new function, while offering a completely new angle to those who could not make it to the festival.
“After years of live streaming Coachella for fans around the world who cannot attend the festival, this year we are bringing you the festival like never before by live streaming select artist performances in 360 degrees this weekend,” said Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer at YouTube, in a blogpost.
With the new streaming option came YouTube’s support for 1440p 60fps resolution for live streams on its service, which can make more enjoyable those 360-degree streams. This resolutions offers 70 percent more pixels than the standard HD resolution of 1080p, as reported by Techcrunch.
In addition, the recently launched spatial audio complements the streaming as users not only can catch new angles but experience real-life sounds where depth, distance and intensity play a role as well, according to Mohan. However, this spatial audio is just available for now in on-demand videos and not live ones.
New Approaches
The company had launched 360-degree videos with some revolutionary artists and brands who wanted to let their followers experience this new technology last year, but this time the California-based company is trying to go further and allow everyone, who can actually afford a 360-degree camera, to stream live in the site.
Virtually reality as well is playing a role in this advances, and YouTube has been working with s ome companies across the industry such as VideoStitch and Two Big Ears to make their software compatible with 360-degree live streams or spatial audio on YouTube, according to Mohan.
Source: YouTube